


Day #6: Stereotype

by bookishandbossy



Series: Fitzsimmons Week [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 18:04:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2119551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How they met, or the beginning of something great.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day #6: Stereotype

Mathematicians are all convinced that their research has no practical applications. Physicists are a bit mad. Quantum physicists are even madder than the regular kind. Chemists like to blow things up. Biologists like to cut dead things up. And biochemists are the worst of all. Leo Fitz glared at the pretty biochemist sitting across from him on the train and reflected that she probably had something dead sitting in that briefcase. Rigged to release nasty neurotoxins if anyone but her touched it.  
He’d met Jemma Simmons before, of course. Introductions at Academy events where he stumbled through his sentences and she smiled politely, required classes that they’d taken together, lab space that they’d had to share. He’d heard about her before he even met her. Child prodigy, real-life Hermione Granger, top of the class at everything. Of course, he’d seen her name above his in the class rankings before he’d even heard of her. But he’d never been stuck on a slow train from Prague to Paris with her. Their Academy class had flown out to Prague for a three-day seminar, with a charter flight booked straight back to the Academy. Only they’d both overslept and they’d arrived at the SHIELD base to see the plane taking off without them. He’d cursed at it, she’d calmly taken out her phone and called one of their professors, who’d arranged for them to catch a flight from the SHIELD center in London, and they’d been informed that they were responsible for getting there on their own. She’d turned to him and said “The Eurorail shouldn’t be too expensive if we book a slow train to Paris and take the Chunnel from there.” He’d eyed her briefcase warily but really, there hadn’t been any other option.  
They were an hour into their fourteen-hour trip to Paris when she finally broke the silence. “I’m Jemma Simmons.” she said, leaning across to offer her hand. “Biochem.”  
“We’ve met before. Leo Fitz. Engineering.” He shook it and resolutely ignored the spark that they both felt.  
“You’re right. We have.” Jemma laughed, a high pitched giggle that sounded nothing like her, and wondered what on earth she had been thinking. Ever since she’d first seen Leo Fitz deliver a rapid-fire explanation of why the device he’d invented, despite the fact that it had set fire to several study rooms, was an important scientific advance, she’d felt…something for him. She didn’t want to call it a crush, or a thing, or even an attraction. It was more like a feeling, a sense that somewhere underneath the prickliness and the sweaters lay something good. Something that she could make better. She could have made it to the plane that morning, if she’d thrown everything into her suitcase, paid a cab a hideous amount of money to take her to the SHIELD base, and used the memory serum on the cabbie afterward. Instead, when she’d heard a long string of Scottish curses and what sounded like an alarm clock breaking, she’d decided to wait for the engineer. He wouldn’t have survived stranded on his own in Prague anyway, she’d told herself, pretending that it was a logical decision rather than a lightning-fast impulse that had caught hold of her and refused to let go.  
“You’re developing the new bio-fiber, right? I’ve seen some of your results and it looks brilliant. I was wondering how…But you probably don’t want to talk about it.” he trailed off. But then she did, spouting off results and variables and experimental procedures, and somehow he found that he was able to talk back. As they traded stories back and forth, he forgot about her amber eyes and the soft curves hiding beneath her sweater, the way her name had looked at the top of the class list until she was no longer the pretty, brilliant girl whose sheer presence had made him trip over his tongue and go weak in places he hadn’t known existed. She became Simmons, the girl who instantly knew how to fix the problem with his drones and finished his sentences without apologizing for it, and by the time they changed trains in Dresden, he had even volunteered to carry her accursed briefcase.  
“I would, only it’s been designed to only respond to me. It would probably blow up if you tried to touch it.” she said apologetically. “It’s got the source for the biofiber in there and if I told you what it was, you’d run screaming.”  
“Just like every other biochemist in the world.” he grumbled.  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was a teasing edge to her voice, one that he might have thought was flirting if he hadn’t known better.  
“You like dead things and you like them even better when you can find creative ways to blow them up.”  
“Not every biochemist does.” Jemma protested. “That’d be like saying that every engineer never sleeps and can’t get a date.”  
“I don’t.” he offered and they both burst out laughing. “Ask me anything: I’m every engineer stereotype rolled up in one. The ramen, the math skills, the grumpiness…”  
“Wait, wait, let me think…In the past month, how many dinners have you eaten outside the lab?” she adopted a mock-serious researcher tone but when he held up three fingers, neither of them could stop laughing. Other people were staring at them, some of them starting to whisper, and they didn’t care. It turned out that once you’ve been the subject of public speculation with someone else, there aren’t many barriers left and they spent the next leg of their train ride trading stories back and forth. The aspiring biologist in her lab who fainted at the sight of a dissection, the five different times Fitz almost blew up his lab and the one time he did, the scientific observations they’d recorded of the parties in the Boiler Room. Somewhere along the way, they started talking about their families, Jemma’s absentminded professor father and Fitz’s bossy older sisters, and their lives before the Academy, the odd sensation of being in class with people much older than you and, even in college, being a prodigy among the prodigies, and Jemma had the oddest feeling that she could tell him anything. That fluttering feeling in her stomach she’d had about him had been right. Only it had been so much more than she’d thought it was. Being with him, talking and sharing an assortment of oddly shaped pastries on a slow train from Prague to Paris—it was like hearing the click of two puzzle pieces finally fitting together. Two very oddly shaped halves finally knowing how to make a whole.  
So when they were told that there were delays further up the track, and they would have to wait for another train the next morning, she simply shrugged and let Fitz hand her suitcase down from the overhead compartment. “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.  
“Somewhere in Germany. I’m not getting any reception.” She frowned at her phone, tilting it upward, then smiled at him hopefully. “Want to be an engineer and fix it?”  
“Only this one time. I’m not going to be your personal engineer.” He warned. But he knew that he already was. After half a hour of poking and prodding at her phone, he announced. “I’m not sure where we are. But I found a beer garden and a hostel. Want to do the proper British thing and get drunk until we can’t complain anymore?”  
“Do you even need to ask?” Hours later, she sat at a bar somewhere in Germany and glared down at her glass. “Fitz, I’m still not drunk.”  
“Neither am I. You’re biochem. You figure it out. My theory is that it’s because we’re British.”  
“Fitz?” she rubbed the fabric of her sweater between two fingers, suddenly nervous.  
“Simmons?”  
“They’re not expecting us back at the Academy for ages—it’s almost spring break. Do you think that we could just keep on going? Taking trains through Europe? I want to go in the field, you know, see the world.” she blurted out. “And I’ve never seen anywhere and I just thought that maybe we could…” He was going to say no, she told herself. He was definitely, definitely going to say no. And then he said yes.  
Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons didn’t come back from Europe for another three weeks. And when they came back, they both knew that, once they’d met, they were never going to be apart again.


End file.
